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Justice Hall – Laurie R. King

Hullo again! It’s been a while since I last posted, and I’ve been hard at work on my 101 books goal (nearly halfway done in under 3 months-perhaps it should have been 1001 books instead…). Here’s my latest Goodreads review:

I am of necessity an advocate for total immersion.

In books, that is.

This one was hard to read. I figured out a big surprise a little too early, for one thing-maybe I’d read too much of the description to be in doubt of the happy ending. For another, SPOILERS that “happy ending” involved a murder. Terry Pratchett’s version of the rough music, dressed up as justice. It was justice, stripped of mercy-it even echoed the major theme of Justice Hall and its ceiling’s roots in Amos. Tied up all the loose ends quite neatly by giving a murderer the death he’d given his victim and preventing him from killing again. That didn’t really matter. I just can’t see that as a good thing, a thing the men who did it should have done. For a third difficulty, how do you experience justice subverted to produce murder and not hate the situation that forced it on you? I came very near hating this book, because it gave me a taste of what trench warfare and execution of innocents might have felt like. Reading the boy’s diary, knowing what would be at the end? That was not a good half hour. END SPOILERS

I didn’t like the author’s lesbian/feminist preaching back when she introduced it early in the series, I didn’t like it here, and I really didn’t like the squishy theology. I didn’t like being forced while in a safe place to inhabit all the emotions of a horrible, helpless one.

Despite all this, I read to the end and gave it 4 stars for good story-telling.